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Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System Is Obsolete

America’s last competitive advantage — its ability to innovate — is at risk as a result of the country’s lackluster education system, according to research by Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.

American schools educate to fill children with knowledge — instead they should be focusing on developing students’ innovation skills and motivation to succeed, he says:

“Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

Knowledge that children are encouraged to soak up in American schools — the memorization of planets, state capitals, the Periodic Table of Elements — can only take students so far. But “skill and will” determine a child’s ability to think outside of the box, he says.

Over two year of research involving interviews with executives, college teachers, community leaders, and recent graduates, Wagner defined the skills needed for Americans to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized workforce. As lined out in his book, “The Global Achievement Gap,” that set of core competencies that every student must master before the end of high school is:

- Critical thinking and problem solving (the ability to ask the right questions)

“We’ve created an economy based on people spending money they do not have to buy things they may not need, threatening the planet in the process,” he says. “We have to transition from a consumer-driven economy to an innovation-driven economy.”

In an effort to discern teaching and parenting patterns, Wagner interviewed innovators in their 20s, followed by interviews with their parents and the influential teachers and mentors in the students’ lives. He found stunning similarities between the teaching styles and goals he encountered with these influential teachers at all levels of education and concludes, “The culture of schooling as we all know it is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators.” He identified five ways in which America’s education system is stunting innovation:

1. Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs — school is a competition among peers. “But innovation is a team sport,” says Wagner. “Yes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.”

2. Specialization is celebrated and rewarded: High school curriculum is structured using Carnegie units, a system that is 125 years old, says Wagner. He says the director of talent at Google once told him, “If there’s one thing that educators need to understand, it’s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content.” Wagner declares, “Learning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives.”

3. Risk aversion is the norm: “We penalize mistakes,” says Wagner. “The whole challenge in schooling is to figure out what the teacher wants. And the teachers have to figure out what the superintendent wants or the state wants. It’s a compliance-driven, risk-averse culture.” Innovation, on the other hand, is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. Educators could take a note from design firm IDEO with its mantra of “Fail early, fail often,” says Wagner. And at Stanford’s Institute of Design, he says they are considering ideas like, “We’re thinking F is the new A.” Without failure, there is no innovation.

4. Learning is profoundly passive: For 12 to 16 years, we learn to consume information while in school, says Wagner. He suspects that our schooling culture has actually turned us into the “good little consumers” that we are. Innovative learning cultures teach about creating, not consuming, he says.

5. Extrinsic incentives drive learning: “Carrots and sticks, As and Fs,” Wagner remarks. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, he says. They aren’t interested in grading scales and petty reward systems. Parents and teachers can encourage innovative thinking by nurturing the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young people, Wagner says. As he describes it, it’s a pattern of “play to passion to purpose.” Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, he says. “Fewer toys, more toys without batteries, more unstructured time in their day.” Those children grow up to find passions, not just academic achievement, he says. “And that passion matures to a profound sense of purpose. Every young person I interviewed wants to make a difference in the world, put a ding in the universe.”

“”We have to transition to an innovation-driven culture, an innovation-driven society,” says Wagner. “A consumer society is bankrupt — it’s not coming back. To do that, we’re going to have to work with young people — as parents, as teachers, as mentors, and as employers — in very different ways. They want to, you want to become innovators. And we as a country need the capacity to solve more different kinds of problems in more ways. It requires us to have a very different vision of education, of teaching and learning for the 21st century. It requires us to have a sense of urgency about the problem that needs to be solved.”

Wagner is not suggesting we change a few processes and update a few manuals. He says, “The system has become obsolete. It needs reinventing, not reforming.”

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As a student, I can personally attest to the annoyance of memorizing pages and pages of information that we forget as soon as the weekly tests are over. Every time I want to have an intellectually stimulating- preferably with a person who actually understands what’s going on in the world- I have to seek out a teacher and discuss topics with them. My classmates rarely look beyond the next class grade; it’s near impossible to have a riveting conversation or explore interests with them.

This is not only a problem in education. Job applications for US industry also seek out specialists, even though I agree fully, that specific knowledge is quick and easy to learn today. People who innovate by nature whether they be young or old are eliminated in most large corporations today. Such people tend to be free thinkers, critical of standardized thought and expectations. They are inquisitive and like to experiment and study relationships in nature. Such people are a nuisance and a threat to today’s insecure managers in businesses of all types and sizes. Such work does not fit today’s “efficiency models”. So while I agree that innovation and innovative people are key to our nation’s survival now and into the future, until such thinking REALLY is accepted (not just politically correct lip-service) throughout society, real innovators will be unemployed in America. I was a successful R&D engineer in corporate America for 37 years (most of which time was highly enjoyable). I was retired 3 years ago and while I thought my resume showed a remarkable ability to create practical solutions to a myriad of technical challenges – i.e. demonstrating my ability as a cross-functional innovator versus a narrow-minded knowledge-based specialist, I did not receive a single job interview after over a 100 applications for similar R&D job postings. People at all stratums of US society are committing a myriad of type III and type IV statistical errors today.

NO Child Left Behind has ruined schools. Here In Florida all they teach in K to 12th grade is how to take the state exam – Fcat. I am a 50+ adult and all I have ever heard from schools is you must get a college degree. Right now somewhere near 50 % of the new grads are unemployed/underemployed. And with big student loans. Your are correct in that we need some changes. But you need to include input from the business’s on how to do it. To ask the educators is like the old saying goes ” if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail”. They will come up with the same old stuff because they were never given the opportunity to think outside the box. We need some outside input into the new courses for the schools.

The entire system needs revamping, kindergarten to 12 and beyond. It is time tax dollars went to developing integrated curriculum that really help kids “get it” instead of just churning out mindless consumers to run on a hamster wheel of corporate profiteering. These kids are our future, not just the governments, or of the corporations, but the way it is now, the state-us-quo just thinks of children as future markets while keeping their mothers voice out of the equation; a practice that must end if improvements are ever to be achieved. Every mother out there wants better, wants to educate children to not think inside a box or be limited by the economic box school systems try to place kids in, but the fact is that the state relies on giving them incomplete information so that they can be easier to take advantage of in the market place. However, it is also a fact that the makers of future markets are responsible for providing a better world for all, despite the many barriers placed in our way, some barriers increasingly difficult, even politicized. Yet, there are many people fed up with all the nonsense, that want to take these barriers down. Lastly, taking down barriers is something we should all work to achieve as quickly as possible in order to solve the most pressing problems of our time.

I’m sorry, but this sounds like another trite corporatist tirade against America’s public education system. Phrases like “innovation” and “creativity” is part of a larger nexus of hypnotizing jargon that’s used to argue for union-busting and education cuts.

I agree that the education system has issues. Mediocre is being rewarded. They’re being taught that since “no child left behind”, the world will cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s near impossible to actually fail in high school.

I’m sorry, there may be all this “innovation” “team spirit” and what-not going on that’s so cruelly stifled, but as long as schools graduate kids that can’t do basic math, can’t spell, don’t read, and have no respect for authority, as well as otherwise have the attention span of a gnat, we will lose our future! This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, now, should it?

Basic knowledge needs to be there, or you don’t have any foundation on which to build. Personal responsibility and the fact that there are indeed consequences to your actions or inactions, as opposed to the current “it’s always someone else’s fault” and “awww, it’ll be alright, regardless what you do, you’re a unique little snowflake” should also be taught.

In short, in my opinion the only thing that stifles innovations is the current system that rewards everything that’s below-average, hinders the above-average, while trying its damndest to lower the average itself.

Well in early days the knowledge was not available via social and online learning systems, so the classical type of education system needed to tech. But now we all agree that knowledge availability is not a big deal using online sources, so why not we change the education system to use the skill is yet not available online which is teach student how to observe these knowledge, how to make right use of the available knowledge online. And most importantly, teach them how to be a creative and innovative using the same knowledge which they are getting online everywhere…. Otherwise free wide available knowledge can have similar larger negative impact on this and coming generation.

In brief, you cannot fly the new advance system with old navigation style, it will collapse.